engaging stories of hope and joy

Santorum, Stelazine, and It Takes All Kinds

Here’s something I never thought I’d hear myself say. When I woke up this morning.

I’ve got to agree with Rick Santorum.

I know, I know. Quick to the medicine cabinet and break open the bottles of thorazine and stelazine and melaril, and every other anti-psychotic medication I still have lying around from the good old days. Maybe one of my neighbors has a syringe, and I can shoot those babies in stat. Quick now, like a bunny, shoot up, tune out, remember it’s only a bad dream – Santorum, Santorum, Santorum.

Anyway, here’s what Rick had to say this morning after the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage – “Stakes are too high to cede marriage to unelected judges.”

Bang! Pow! Shazam all over again. Ricky got it right on that one. Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, one hunnerd percent right, Ricky.

Normally I don’t agree so much with Mr. Santorum. I’d say – hmmm – about zero percent of the time. Hey, we’re just two cools dudes in loose moods that happen to look at the way of the world through different eyes. S’why we have that saying, “It takes all kinds.”

But I agree with him this morning, on this particular statement, concerning this very subject. Because there is absolutely no reason on this God-given planet for nine people in robes to be deciding for anyone who can and cannot speak to their own special particular quality of love and do what’s been going on since before even the Tigress and Euphrates became popular vacation spots, and propose marriage and become married. None. Zero. All wrong. Couldn’t be wronger.

I’ll mostly quote Johnnie Mathis here, who, coincidentally, is a big fave with a long-time-ago-lesbian-friend-who-I-had-a-wicked-crush-on-but-she-just-chuckled-at-me: “It’s not for them to say.”

Cause it isn’t. Why should any two people on the face of this gray and granite planet need a law to say they can speak to their special love with the act of marriage – a union between two people who want to spend their lives together, two people lucky enough to find someone to make them feel that way. A law? That says okay? I guess it’s alright? Go ahead? If you feel you must?

Please. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

I don’t know how many of the millions of people jumping up and down and celebrating today, with real tears of joy and thanks, thinking free at last, free at last, holding hands and kumbaya-ing all over the place with each rainbowed other, have thought, for instance, if that old Great Powhatan in the sky had seen fit to make just one change of lifespan on the planet – say, Ruth Ginsberg – which meant that President George W. Bush had the chance to pick another justice and picked someone like, say, Michelle Bachmann (and I’m a big fan of hers, I’m just using her as an example, really), so that today, therefore, the Supreme Court of The United States ruled 5-4 that there was NO constitutional right for two people of the same sex to enter into holy wedlock – well then, kids, WTF then? Are we still dancing? And romancing? Are we still ringing it around the rainbow rosy? Is everyone chiming in with their same two cents (quite like me now) with hallelujahs or dagnabbits or god will get evens or whatever? So that, if aliens are tracking our progress on big screens in the sky, they would get to watch the one hunnerd percent exact opposite of what is happening, and whose saying what and, even, whose zooming who, today?

Would that make the marriage between two people who want to get married – regardless of their sex, color, orientation, political party, religious affiliation, place of birth, date of birth, choice of favorite ice cream, Red Sox-Yankee fan, or any defining characteristic you can think of – would that make that marriage any less right? Any less sacred?

Would it?

So those who celebrate today – and, just for clarity, I’m a tea-totaling left-leaning hippie yippie cowsills lovin’ the flower girl Joan Baez for President one of them – think about it. You could just as easily, within the whimsicalness of life in the big city, been crying.

Stakes are too high to cede marriage to anyone other than the two people deciding to do it.

In other words – right wing tea party white supremacists religious morons and lefty leaning save the planet gluten-free-only liberals – get the hell out of my big church.

This is my Blog, my opportunity to say what I think and write what I feel. The content has morphed in the two years of existence -- I began with personal tales of sillyness and drunkeness and soberness and times, places, and events within. Then I wrote a whole a lot of opinions about the world and its often sad shape, and how I thought we could make it better (re: engaging stories of hope). More recently I've taken to writing about this and that, including links to movies, Ted Talks, rock and roll, other writers' web pages, and more. These past seven years I have taken up the life of a painter, and my work can be seen on my web page ( www.buddycushmanfineart.com ) and my Etsy shop (www.etsy.com/shop/musicflower67). But I've been writing since I was just a young thing living on the Massachusetts coast, and storytelling is my home. I have a number of fiction works in varying degrees of completion, and have published two books of fiction in the last year, under the name W.B. Cushman. But it's here I get to share my whatevers of sorrow and hope, and hopefully, wonder and magic. Thanks for stopping in.